February 5 in History

February 5 is the 36th day of the year. There are 330 days remaining until the end of the year.

February 5 is National Weatherperson’s Day in the United States.

• 1778 – South Carolina became the first state to ratify the Articles of Confederation.
• 1852 – The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, opened to the public.
• 1917 – The US Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, it forbade immigration from nearly all of south and southeast Asia.
• 1918 – Stephen Thompson shot down a German airplane. It is the first aerial victory by the US military. 
• 1919 – Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith launched United Artists, an American film studio.
• 1924  – The Royal Greenwich Observatory began broadcasting the hourly time signals known as the Greenwich Time Signal.
• 1958 – A hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb was lost by the US Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, never to be recovered.
• 1971 – Astronauts landed on the moon in the Apollo 14 mission.
• 1997 – The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announced the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.